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User blog:Mel Hood/December 2013 Notes from Producer Michael
Happy Frost Fayre to all Trappers! First up, thank you to everyone who has played Here Be Monsters this year, and especially those who have supported us by making any purchase. We appreciate it and without you we wouldn’t be able to continue building this game we love. The team will mostly be on holidays next week, and before we go I wanted to write up my last Producer’s Notes for the year and fill you in on what we’ve been up to, and what’s coming next! 2013 has been a year full of hard work, hard changes and getting HBM ready for more players. Again, thank you to everyone who has played this year, provided feedback (even when it was in ALL CAPS), helped other Trappers out and especially been patient with changes to the game and long waits for new quests. The start of 2014 is all about recruiting new Trappers from around the world! We’ll launch new platforms, new languages, new cities and of course, new quests! Upcoming Quests Next up after the Frost Fayre is a small quest line featuring Davey the Fisherman which we’ve pre-published and will activate on January 2nd (which is why some of you noticed a new Quest Achievement in your Almanac). Look for Davey in London on the 2nd. After that we’ve been working on the next chapters of the House of Li and the Chef of Steel Competition questlines. We hope you’re looking forward to seeing how these play out. iPad We’re very close to having the iPad version ready. We’re at the point of bug testing and optimisation and have been working hard to get it submitted to Apple as early as possible next year. Our current plan is to release here in the UK first, before launching in the US once we’re happy the game is running well. Remember, if you’re playing HBM now on Facebook, you will be able to continue your game on the iPad or jump back and forth between the two. We’ll keep you updated on progress in January - and will especially be hoping for your support in downloading the game when it launches (it will of course be free on iPad too). Herebemonstersgame.com As well as the iPad version of the game, we’ve also soft launched herebemonstersgame.com (we’re not advertising it just yet while we work out any kinks). This is a browser-based version of the game which will allow us to target players who might not play games on Facebook, but would enjoy HBM. We’ll also be looking at integrating into games portals like Kongregate in the new year. The plan is to get as many people playing and supporting HBM as possible so we can make the game even bigger and better (and make more new content faster!). Feel free to check out the website, but be aware that if you start an account on herebemonstersgame.com it won’t be connected to your current Facebook HBM account (even if you use Facebook to sign in on the website). This is because of Facebook’s policies, obviously they don’t want us moving players from Facebook to a web version where Facebook would not make any commission on your purchases. The web version really is primarily for new players, we’re not expecting our current Facebook players to switch to it. If you think you might like to start again on the web version however (instead of Facebook) and also play on the iPad when it’s released, then please start a Gamesys account on herebemonstersgame.com and those accounts will be linked. Apologies that this is more complex than we’d like, but that’s beyond our control. The main thing to remember if you’re a current Facebook player is you’ll be able to continue playing on the iPad as soon as it’s released. Brazilian Portuguese We’ve completed the translation of the game into our first new language! We have a little bit of tech work to do to enable changing languages in the game, and this has been held up while we do essential things for the iPad launch, but we’re hoping to launch HBM in Brazil as soon as possible. As we’ve said before, if that goes well then we’ll quickly add several other languages. The great thing is we only have to do the tech work once so extra languages don’t require much extra work from the team (just lots of work from our localisation partners). We’ll let you know when we’re ready to launch Brazilian Portuguese and hope you’ll say ‘bem-vindo’ to our new Trappers when they arrive. PR Launch - Here Be Knitters? In order to help make the iPad version of the game as successful as possible, we’ll also be launching our first PR campaign for the game. We’ll focus on getting as many relevant websites and publications to preview and review HBM as possible. We’re going to target iPad game sites and also some more general lifestyle game sections (like the national newspapers) both in the UK and US. Luckily a lot of the UK media are based here in London, so we’re planning on inviting journalists to the office to see the game ahead of its iPad release. As part of this we’re producing a ‘Gift Box’ (just like the ones that drop on your Homestead) as the invitation. The box will contain a hardcover book featuring the art of the game, some actual Ministry Waybread (which bears more than a little resemblance to shortbread) and we’d love to include a monster from the game. We’ve looked at 3D printing, but the results are still not as good as we’d like and seemed a little ‘tech’ for HBM. And then we remembered a fan of the game knitted Wolpertingers and they look awesome. She’s generously provided us with the pattern and we’re going to try and get 25 of them knitted up in January: https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/25823/304549/ZcJxwiFOpg1PzfJ/100913.jpg So if we have any talented Trappers whose crafting skills extend to knitting and would like to help us out - please message me or one of the Forum Admins (Alex, Dee, Chris) (on the main HBM Forum) and we’ll let you know what’s involved. Thank you all again I think that’s it for now. I’ll try and check in on that over the holidays to answer any questions that come up. Again, on behalf of the whole team, thank you for an incredibly challenging and rewarding first year of Here Be Monsters. We’re very excited to see what 2014 brings and hope you are too! Producer-Michael. The link to the full post on the hbm forum: Producer's Notes for Dec 2013 What this means for the Wiki The New Beginning from Oct 2013, has changed. We'll be working on fixing this. Category:Blog posts